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Alister Fletcher
Alister Fletcher is a wannabe historian from the Legend timeline who has been unsuccessfully trying to finish his dissertation for 40 years. Realising that he may not be able to do so before he dies of old age, he now helps Lara Croft uncover the mysteries of the past, hoping to find something that can grant him eternal youth so he can keep writing his dissertation forever. His help mainly consists of talking to Lara via headset, occasionally dropping know-it-all remarks on boring historical facts that Lara really ought to know herself, and threatening to throw up whenever she does something risky. Biography Alister, along with Zip, is first introduced as a disembodied voice in Lara’s head while she’s bringing trouble upon Bolivia, casually commenting on pretty much everything she does on screen and giving away the solution to every puzzle she comes across. At this point it’s not entirely clear to first-time players if the two guys even really exist or if Lara is just schizophrenic. On her return to Croft Manor, it turns out that he is indeed real, and really has no clue about anything that’s been going on. During Lara’s trip to the tomb of the last Queen of Tiwanaka in Peru, he keeps questioning the reality behind everything, including the existence of Excalibur and the possibility of Amanda Evert having survived her and Lara’s first exploration of said tomb. His disbelief does not stop Amanda from coming for him and Zip later, though, first offering, then threatening to get sexual with them to make them hand over the Ghalali key while Lara isn’t there to protect them. That’s when their radio briefly goes silent and Lara is forced to use her own brain to understand what is happening around her without Alister’s constant babbling. Alister turns out to be fine after Amanda’s visit, but doesn’t stop being an unnerving, nagging nuisance until Lara puts all the fragments of Excalibur on a table in front of him, which leads to him finally changing his mind about the King Arthur myth and smugly predicting that his colleagues at Oxford University will give birth to cat babies because of it. Despite this realization, however, he quickly reverts back to his unbelieving self when the next ancient artefact, Thor’s hammer, becomes the new centre of attention in Tomb Raider Underworld. Whether or not he would have believed that myth too upon seeing Lara wearing all of Thor's gear right in front of him, we will never know, because Amanda never gets over him refusing to have sex with her and later sends a doppelgänger of Lara to kill him and Zip (and to steal the wraith stone back while she’s at it). While Zip gets away with a relatively harmless bullet wound in his leg, Alister is shot in the chest and dies in the real Lara’s arms shortly thereafter, promising to meet her again in Avalon. He never shows up when Lara gets there, however, meaning that Alister basically wasted his last breath to become a dirty liar. Personality and Appearance Alister is very squeamish and fearful, nearly shitting his pants when a random thug threatens him with a machine gun at the King Arthur Museum, as if he hadn’t had enough time to get used to things like that while working for Lara. The thing he’s most afraid of, however, is his own age, which is why he uses Leigh Cosmetics products on his skin more often than necessary, and dresses like a 60-year-old to hide the fact that he’s already pushing 70. Despite his blue eyes, his attitude is quite the opposite of blue-eyed, refusing to believe anything he can’t see. This makes it questionable if he even believes in the reality of the historical events he’s been studying. He has no qualms about offending other people with different opinions, but quickly gets offended himself. When a younger student he met at university once called him a "gay history teacher", Alister did everything in his power to debunk this nasty rumour, assuring everyone that he’s not a history teacher. Another discrepancy about Alister is his weight in comparison to his height. While he’s clearly taller than Lara, she has no problem whatsoever carrying his body out of Croft Manor after he’s been killed by the Doppelgänger. However, this may be because he finally did shit his pants when the Doppelgänger shot him, and since he was full of shit while he was still alive, everything that might have made him heavy was left on the floor of Croft Manor after his death.